Harry S Truman on Homeland Security

1941: War profiteering is treason

In early 1941, Truman took a 10,000-mile tour around the US to look into rumors of defense contractor mismanagement.
When he returned, he convinced a Senate and a president from his own party that waste and corruption would impair the nation's mobilization for war.
On March 1, 1941, the Truman Committee was born, launching a 3-year marathon investigation into "waste, inefficiency, mismanagement, and profiteering," saving millions of dollars and the lives of American soldiers.

Truman considered war profiteering "treason." It still is. And the senators who stand by and allow it to happen must be called to account. Their refusal to act is killing our men and women in uniform.

Truman Committee exposed military waste & fraud

As war clouds gathered in 1940, Truman chaired a Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. The "Truman Committee" saved billions of dollars and countless lives by exposing waste, fraud, and incompetence in
the country's military complex. One of its most dramatic achievements was forcing the Navy to test its own tank carrier against one designed by shipbuilder Andrew Jackson Higgins.
In a moderate sea, the Navy's craft foundered.
Higgins's skimmed the waves, landed, unloaded its tank, put it back on board, then repeated this operation several times. His troop landing craft did just as well. Higgins's boat later landed at Normandy on D-Day.

Initiated full racial integration of the armed forces

In time he established a President's Committee on Civil Rights, initiated full integration of the armed forces, banned discrimination in federal firing, introduced legislation to outlaw lynching, and revived the
Fair Employment Practices Committee.

On the eve of 1948's Democratic Convention, a delegation of southerners said they'd only support Truman for reelection if he'd soften his stand on civil rights, Truman wrote them:

"My forebears were Confederates. But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.
Whatever my inclination as a native of Missouri might have been, as president I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this."

1940s: Stop the Red advance by military aid to Europe

President Harry Truman called on Congress to stop the Red advance across Europe by approving US military aid to help governments in Greece and Turkey resist left-wing insurgencies.

Jack Kennedy thought stopping the Soviet advance in Europe was the only
way to avoid repeating the mistake of not stopping the Nazi advance at the Munich Conference of 1938. Had Hitler been confronted before his deadly attack on Poland the following year, he might have retreated.
Instead, it was the Allies who were thrown on the defensive. Having lived through prewar appeasement and its consequences, the WWII generation had come home from the South Pacific and
Europe determined to prevent a sequel to the tragedy that had interrupted and harrowed their lives and erased so many others. This time, the dictator must be stopped in his tracks.

Cold War averted World War Three

"I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the 'cold war' began to overshadow our lives. I have had hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle--this conflict between those who love
freedom and those who would lead the world back into slavery and darkness. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb.

"But when history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the cold war,
it will also say that in those 8 years we have set the course that can win it. We have succeeded in carving out a new set of policies to attain peace--positive policies, policies of world leadership, policies that express faith in other free people.
We have averted World War Three up to now, and we may already have succeeded in establishing conditions which can keep that war from happening far ahead as man can see."

Propose Soviet disarmament; but build up army to 3 million

The United Nations, the world's greatest hope for peace, has come through a year of trial stronger and more useful than ever. The free nations have stood together in blocking Communist attempts to tear up the charter.

At the present session of the
United Nations in Paris, we, together with the British and the French, offered a plan to reduce and control all armaments under a foolproof inspection system. This is a concrete, practical proposal for disarmament.

If the Soviet leaders were to accept this proposal, it would lighten the burden of armaments, and permit the resources of the earth to be devoted to the good of mankind. But until the Soviet Union accepts a sound disarmament proposal, and joins in
peaceful settlements, we have no choice except to build up our defenses.

During this past year we added more than a million men & women to our Armed Forces. The total is now nearly 3 million. We have made rapid progress in the field of atomic weapons.

UN should control weapons of mass destruction

We are working toward the time when the United Nations will control weapons of mass destruction and will have the forces to preserve international law and order.

As an immediate means to this end we must continue our support of the European recovery program. This program has achieved great success in the first 2 years of its operation, but it has not yet been completed.
If we were to stop this program now, or cripple it, just because it is succeeding, we should be doing exactly what the enemies of democracy want us to do.
We should be just as foolish as a man who, for reasons of false economy, failed to put a roof on his house after building the foundation and the walls.